Review: The way to 'Happiness' falls a bit short

"In Pursuit of Happiness: Better Living from Plato to Prozac"
By Mark Kingwell
Crown
Non-fiction/Cultural criticism
392 pages

In this story: No easy conclusions Bleak and amusing, by turns RELATED STORIES, SITES

By Robert Beveridge
Special to CNN.com

(CNN) -- I wanted to like this book. Its preface is irresistible, and I have a hard time disliking anyone who could use a sentence like this:

"(N)or is it the case, as some people have suggested, that all tenured professors are like the tiny marine creature known as the sea squirt, whose unique evolutionary strategy involves finding a suitable home to attach itself to, at which point, finding the organ no longer necessary for survival, it consumes its own brain as food."

How beautiful is that? The problem is that we're handed a perfect setup backed up with something considerably less so.

On its back jacket, "In Pursuit of Happiness" is listed as philosophy. Kingwell refers to his own manuscript as cultural criticism, and the tone and diction read, for the most part, like a hybrid of the latter with a self-help manual. All this is not necessarily a bad thing, especially when one is attempting to reach an audience is wider than that which most cultural criticism attracts.

But Kingwell has taken on a somewhat Herculean task here. He tries not only to pursue happiness, but to define what it is. This means the book is a mix of all of the above -- philosophy, cultural criticism, and self-help -- but it doesn't quite fulfill any of its goals.

Kingwell is, above all, an exceptionally well-read individual. It's hard not to approve of someone who refers to -- and quotes in places -- Bill Bryson, whose travelogues may have inspired more pleasure than anything printed since Gutenberg decided to automate the printing process.

Yet paradoxically, it's exactly the approach he takes to his work here that gives the book its major weakness. In order to keep it from degenerating completely into the world of self-help, Kingwell realizes, and states, early on that he's not going to come to any easy conclusions about how to make people happy in 25 words or less. In fact, he quite rightly makes fun of those who attempt such things.

Mark Kingwell

The problem is that, given the lack of those conclusions -- and knowing we're facing that lack from page one -- the book seems to have less of a point than it otherwise would.

This may be because Kingwell personalizes his subject. While he's tracing the history of man's search for happiness throughout the ages, he's also doing experiments on his own (going to a "happiness clinic," taking Prozac, etc.) and reporting back. When this style works, it's intensely absorbing; when it doesn't, it makes the book in question seem as if it were two parts barely, if at all, connected.

That's not really as much a knock on the book as it sounds. The component parts are certainly interesting enough, and everything Kingwell makes of the various approaches humanity as a whole has taken to happiness over the ages is logical enough (though some of his assertions may ruffle the feathers of Christians who pick this up). From this perspective, the reader is left with a fascinating reading list of primary sources and some head starts on questions to ask when reading, say, John Stuart Mill or Epictetus.

Meanwhile, Kingwell's own experiments are by turns bleak and amusing, and he allows the sharp, sarcastic side that penned the quote in this review's first paragraph to come out more fully. There are times when I felt I could have learned less (and I wonder, vaguely, whether Kingwell lost any friends after the publication of this book), but I never felt as if I needed more background on any given topic he brought up, and that's rare.

Ultimately, Kingwell's hope in writing this is not that the reader will achieve happiness through the book itself, but may find new ways to ask the questions that need asking for a person to achieve personal happiness. And in that light, though in a roundabout way, Kingwell does a creditable job in achieving his goal. He just meshed two different books while doing it.

TIME.com: Cell phones, dot-coms and Prozac were my friends ...
July 19, 2000

Crown Publishing (Random House)
Mark Kingwell biography

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